PROTECTING THE CHILDREN

UNICEF marked its 50th anniversary today by calling attention to the devastation that children are suffering in the regional wars underway around the world. TIME's Bonnie Angelo reports, "The strength of UNICEF is that it has never lost its focus on children. Because the leadership has been hands on and carefully chosen, it has a clearly defined sense of its parameters, unlike many other United Nations organizations, which are diffuse and disorganized." UNICEF's new ten-point anti-war plan calls for systematic reporting of war crimes against women and children, moves to discourage child conscription, to monitor the effects of economic sanctions on children, and to ban land mines. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran sometimes sent armies of children through Iraqi minefields, sacrificing them in order to make a safe pathway for troops.